[cancer] A potentially significant epiphanette concerning fairness

Yesterday, Lisa Costello and I were discussing the emotional infrastructure of cancer, as we are sometimes wont to do. I was on my oft-told riff about allowing myself to experience the emotions of this process as honestly as possible. Grief, rage, loss, and so forth. (The emotion of the day happened to be peevishness, which is one of my least favorite for its sheer pettiness.) I repeated my comment that the only emotion I don’t permit myself is a sense of unfairness. The universe just is, fairness doesn’t enter in to this.

Except then I realized that the whole question of fairness is a more sophisticated concept than that. It falls within the realm of those human elements without correspondent empirical manifestation — justice, mercy, honor, and love, for example. My whole life is unfair in some significant ways that happen to benefit me at the expense of others. I am tall(ish) white man of WASP extraction born in mid-twentieth century America. The degree of privilege and ease that has cloaked me all my life is a form of unfairness to others so pervasive that most people in our society never recognize it all. I was in my twenties before I first began to glimpse my own good fortunes as a social justice issue.

So is cancer fair? No. Neither is my nice, well-paid, white collar job that permits me to work sitting down at home, preserving both paycheck and health insurance benefits in the face of cancer’s unfairness. Instead of taking a leave of absence or becoming permanently unemployed because I don’t have the capability to do my job.

This seems important to me. I don’t know what it means yet, I need to think more, but my denial of unfairness is beginning to feel simplistic and unsophisticated to me.

When we’d say “that’s not fair” my dad would reply “nobody said life would be fair.” He’d then go on to say, cryptically, “and it’s unfair in your favor, so eat your vegetables,” (or some other parental admonition regarding our complaint.)

It seems to me that when you talk about fairness, it’s as a synonym for justice. I’ve been thinking a lot about that in other contexts, and I think we denigrate justice because it’s not something we discover (like a law of motion) but something we create (like building a house). The universe doesn’t have justice or fairness built into it, but it doesn’t have a lot of other things built into it either. Fairness and justice exist the same way as houses or books do: as human constructions. That doesn’t make them unreal. As to your situation, it seems to me that what you’re turning away from is cultivated self-self-pity. That just seems wise. Cultivated self-pity is its own punishment.

For you — or anyone, really — I don’t know that there’s a right balance between gratitude and mourning. Or a wrong one. That’s an ongoing construction project, and likely always will be.

Good point. As straight, white, middle aged men living in a first world country, we are the 1% of the planet.

I don’t think I’ve thought this all the way through but I feel that maybe life’s fair in that who, where and when we’re born are random and then random things happen to us. In the specific case good and bad events aren’t evenly distributed but over the whole of humanity they are, which somehow seems fair to me.

It seems to me that “fair” is a human concept. The universe is neither fair nor unfair — it just is. We choose to look at various circumstances and call some fair and some unfair. I think human behavior can be fair or unfair, as judged by ourselves, but that is as far as the concept can go.

I long ago figured out that “fairness” was a human construct. As such, when complaints to my parents about the “unfairness” of something brought out the old parental platitude of “no one ever said life was fair” it always struck me as an excerise in profoundly missing the point.

No, no one said it would be fair, like there’s some universal Fairness calculator that enforces fairness in some arbitrary and natural process. If something’s not fair, it’s our duty to make it fair, because we are the ones who make and define fairness.

The first time I ever saw my medical oncologyst, at the end of the visit she said ‘it’s not fair.’. At the time, it struck me as wierd. Nobody gave me cancer. It was not personal. It was only after all the treatment and so on that the full force of the experience hit me and I began to think it was unfair. As the shock wanes, my rage has increased. Although I am still aware, objectively, that nothing about it was personal, my already tormented self just feels like I got one more rock in my Hallowe’en bag.

I’ve thought a bit about fairness since my own diagnoses (four years ago). My own perception is that I have been exceedingly well provisoned, fairness-wise, throughout my life (born to people who wanted and loved me, raised in a loving and supportive cocoon, married for almost thirty years to a woman who puts up with me, etc.). In fact, I’ve barely experienced unfairness.
That said, I share your intolerance of peevishness and self-pity…which I occasionally find myself feeling. The ability and inclination to think about these issues is one major reason why you have a will to persist.

I think you’re getting somewhere in your thoughts about this. Not that I have the answer. . . When I was enduring cancer treatment, fairness wasn’t a concern of mine, though I had friends who were upset on my behalf. I have friends I regard as better (on some goodness scale of my own imagination, perhaps) than myself who have died, or suffered from cancer. No one deserves cancer.

Oddly, though I hated cancer, and all that it implied, my overwhelming sense throughout the main episode of that experience was that I was blessed. Not blessed with cancer, of course, but blessed with friends & family, decent insurance, good doctors.